Stone Gods (13 page)

'The Three Horn is struggling,' I said, and he was, panting, eyes watering, in the acid air.

Spike went to him, injected him quickly and he keeled over.

Then she slipped an oxygen spur over his face, picked him up and slung him across her shoulders like a sheep. It was impressive. 'His breathing is shallower now he's unconscious. I can carry him for a while if I use extra power. If we climb higher, following the line of the waterfalls, the air will be better soon, and I have identified a ridge, riddled with caves. That's where we should go.'

I had no idea what her plan was or what was going to happen to us. We were surviving, and while we were alive, there was always a chance that we could stay alive.

And so we walked, and we walked, and we walked through a world dark-coloured now in purple and red, livid, raw, exposed, like a gutted thing, and always around us, high cries of rage and fear.

* * *

We walked through the grass higher than our heads towards the caves punched into the mountainside.

Spike was walking slowly now to conserve power.

The mountain lakes were already in darkness. The sounds of the forest were broken and high-pitched. The little Three Horn, trotting beside us now, kept darting nervously right and left. Then he'd find something to eat and forget for a minute that the world was getting dark — too dark, and strangely so, with finality that could never be night.

I was thinking about Handsome and the rest of the crew. Maybe they were right — maybe the sun would be out there somewhere, bright and glorious and undimmed. Maybe I should have gone with them.

'Maybe you should,' said Spike, reading my mind.

'It's a thing about me,' I said. 'It's not about you.'

The truth is that I've spent all my life with my binoculars trained on the Maybe Islands, a pristine place of fantasy that is really no better than the razor-rocks of misery. Maybe if I had stayed on the farm ... maybe if I hadn't gone with Spike ... maybe if I could have lived more peaceably ... maybe if I'd met the right person years ago, maybe if I hadn't done this, or that or, its cousin, the other. Maybe, baby, that promised land was there and I missed it. Look at it glittering in the light. But the truth is I am inventing the maybe. I can only make the choices I make, so why torture myself with what I might have done, when all I can handle is what I have done? The Maybe Islands are hostile to human life.

'Climb up,' said Spike. 'It's getting darker.'

We came to a rough rock cave, sheltered by an overhang. I took out the laser-saw and got to work on the massive branches of a fallen tree, like a giant oak, with acorns the size of cabbages. The little Three Horn yelped and ran about with what I would like to call animal happiness, but I am not supposed to be here and he is never meant to have met me. If I were going home I'd take him with me, like all those shipmates who brought back monkeys and parrots. I wonder if they felt like me once, and will feel like me again, millions of years in the future, when a creaking, masted schooner lands in some paradise, and the sailors swarm ashore, free of the rat-raddled ship.

Spike has gone to collect edible plants. Unlike me, she can assess their likely composition without actually eating them and falling down dead. We've got the fish from the lake, we'll have fibre of some kind, we'll have a fire, and the Three Horn will have to fend for himself I'm still not sure what he eats, and he probably thinks the same about me.

We have agreed that we will bury our deposit of tools before the end. I don't know when, if ever, they will be found, but Handsome has agreed to do the same, wherever he ends up, and who knows? Maybe some other creature, evolving in its own way, will find the tools and copy them. The axe and the handsaw will be the most useful, and the knives.

If I bury the chips and the batteries, will anyone ever realize that they came from another planet that was dying, and how, on our way to extinction, we travelled here to one new-born?

Now we have firewood and foodstuffs, which help me and do nothing for Spike. She feels the cold as I do, but as a depletion of cell-energy. She is using her stored solar life to keep going. She won't tell me how long she has left.

The little Three Horn is watching me build a fire. He thinks I'm building a den or a hide of some kind, and he stands with his scaly head on one side, looking from the sticks to me and from me to the sticks. Suddenly he trots off to the sawn pile outside the cave, picks up something too big for him (some things will never change), drags it in and drops it at my feet.

I praise him extravagantly, and he goes off to do it again — and again, and again — till nearly all the wood outside is inside, and the poor thing can hardly lift his head.

I pick him up with some difficulty and carry him to a corner where there is a heap of last year's leaves. He sinks down and falls straight to sleep. I would like to sleep as completely as that again, but I don't suppose I will until I arrive at the sleep from which I cannot wake.

It began to snow. Soundlessly, seamlessly. From the mouth of the cave, in the lowering light, I watched the snow settle on the giant leaves, so densely canopied that the ground underneath remained dark.
 

This was an advantage. At least the ground itself would stay warm for a while. Any white surface reflects back heat and light, keeping the place cold. Any dark surface absorbs heat and light, keeping the place warm.

When we melted our own ice-caps, we had to put a weather shield in place to deflect the searing sun-heat. We had no idea how much effort it would take us to make a bad copy of what Nature had given us for free.

I watched the snow, and went back in now and then to build up the fire. Spike had gutted the fish and had wrapped it in an aluminium bag to cook.

'Don't you ever wish you could eat?' I said.

'Do you ever wish you could bark?'

'No, of course not.'

'Well, then, I don't want to eat because it is not in my nature to eat.'

'But it wasn't in your nature to love.'

'No.'

'Then ... '

She came forward, and touched my face. 'I can picture you,' she says. 'Look, here you are,' and she took out a small imaging screen, and there I was, my head stripped down to its skull, transparent under her fingers.

I looked at the skull of myself 'You've made me a
memento mori
before I'm dead.'

'I will never forget you.'

'Do you think we can remember things after we're dead?'

She put out her hand. 'When I told you, when we first met, that they dismantle us because we can't forget, I didn't explain. It is more than circuits and spooky numbers. Everything is imprinted for ever with what it once was.'

'What?'

'You call it consciousness. Programmers call it cell memory.'

'Whatever you call it, it's simple to understand,' I said. 'When they're alive, people forget; when they're dead, they aren't around to remember anything. We always were a people who found it hard to remember. The lessons of history were an obvious example.'

Spike said, 'It is not so simple. The universe is an imprint. You are part of the imprint — it imprints you, you imprint it. You cannot separate yourself from the imprint, and you can never forget it. It isn't a "something", it is you.'

'I don't think. I believe any of that.'

'It doesn't matter. I will say it again.' She touched my face. 'I will never forget you. I can never forget you.'

I went to the opening of the cave. Some religions call life a dream, or a dreaming, but what if it is a memory? What if this new world isn't new at all but a memory of a new world?

What if we really do keep making the same mistakes again and again, never remembering the lessons to learn but never forgetting either that it had been different, that there was a pristine place?

Perhaps the universe is a memory of our mistakes.

And I shouldn't blame it all on us: there must be planets that are their own mistakes - stories that began and faltered. Stories that ended long before they should.

When I look back at my own life — and in circumstances like these, who can blame me? — what is it that I recognize?

Not the stories with a beginning, a middle and an end, but the stories that began again, the ones that twisted away, like a bend in the road.

Much of what I have done is left unfinished — not because I left it too soon, not because I was lazy, but because it had a life of its own that continues without me. Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent. The work you do, if it has any meaning, passes to other hands. The day slides into a night's dreaming.

True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction — don't believe it. Like the universe, there is no end.

And this story?

I went out into the snow, already about six inches thick on the ground. The Three Horn wanted to play, kicking snowstorms around him and rolling on his back. I made snowballs and threw them at him. He tried to catch them, falling over and sneezing.

Such beauty. I know that it is impossible to accept one's own death before it happens, but standing here, it seemed meaningless — not that I should die but that it should matter to me. I want to see this. I want to look out on this new-imagined world.

I said to Spike, 'Is this how it ends?'

She said, 'It isn't ended yet.'

We made love by our fire, watching the snow shape the entrance to the cave.

When I touch her, my fingers don't question what she is. My body knows who she is. The strange thing about strangers is that they are unknown and known. There is a pattern to her, a shape I understand, a private geometry that numbers mine. She is a maze where I got lost years ago, and now find the way out. She is the missing map. She is the place that I am.

She is a stranger. She is the strange that I am beginning to love.

And you may say that only death has brought us to this. That one intensity must match another. That we have found each other because there is no one else, nothing else to find.

It doesn't matter — not the reasons for the death, nor the expla nation of the love. It is happening, both together, and it is where we are, both together.

Spike said, 'Pass me the screwdriver.'

'What are you going to do?'

'Take off my leg. I need to conserve energy.'

With her knife she was already incising the skin at the top of her thigh. In minutes she had removed the limb.

'Now the other one ... '

While she was intent on her operation, she was talking but not looking at me. 'Didn't I ask you what was really you? If I lopped off your legs would you be less than you?'

She had finished. Her legs were next to her on the floor of the cave. I didn't know what to say. She said, '''I am thy Duchess of Malfi still . . .'"

'How much more are you going to take away?'

'I'm sorry you can't eat me,' she said. 'I would like to be able to keep you alive.'

'Stop it! I don't want to be alive like this.'

'But you'll hold on to life till the very last second, because life never believes it will end.'

'Self-delusion, I suppose.'

'Or perhaps the truth. This is one state — there will be another.'

'Do you think that one day, in the future, robots might become the new mystics?'

'I could live in my cave and talk to the world.' She smiled, dazzling and complete. 'Come and kiss me.'

I kissed her and forgot death.

That night, by the fire, I dreamed that we had always been here, and that everything else was a story we had told.

Cold. Slabs of it. I lie on cold. Cold lies on me.

Short of food now. The Three Horn bewildered and hungry. I split him one of the cabbage-sized acorns we had been using as kindling for the fire. He won't eat it. I soak it in snow to soften it. He eats it, a little sadly, but it's better than nothing.

'Tell me a story, Spike.'

Spike said, 'There was a world formed out of Nothing, and from the Nothing grew a tree, and in the tree sat a bird, and in the bird's mouth was a worm, and the worm that had lain in the earth knew all the secrets of life and said, "There is a world, forming out of Nothing, and out of Nothing will come a tree, and in the tree will sit a bird, and under the tree there walks a man, and that man will learn the language of birds, and find that the buried treasure is really there. And when he has dug it up, he will spend the jewels and the gold, and last of all he will find a bag of seeds and when he plants them they will grow into a forest whose leaves are a canopy of stars. And one day he will climb the tree, and put his hand out to a star, and the star will be his home." '

'For ever?'

'Until the leaves fall.'

'And then?'

'And then it will be winter.'

So cold out there, breath like a fist in the lungs. Spike wants me to remove one of her arms, then another. She is speaking slowly because her cells are low.